On 2/14/2015 11:46 PM, Malcolm Smith wrote:
Jostein Øksne wrote:
I think I disagree with your blanket statement that obsolence of either
makes them unrecoverable. If anything, it takes obsolence of both in my
opinion, but in either case it's more a matter of how much you are
willing to pay for recovery.
What really sucked about analog was that the original could not be
copied at all without quality loss. Digital can be migrated losslessly
between media for as long as you bother to migrate to new hardware
regularly. Like with your tape reader. Since migrating to floppies,
that's your historic 'event horizon'. If then migrated to CDs, why
would you look back to floppies.
And yeah, ImageMagick is a godsend, but only for us computer geeks. ;-)
It's very likely in 30 or 40 years time, the late 1980s to early
2000s will be the dark ages of family history. Because of our
interest here, we are aware of the importance of backing files up and
transferring them to the most modern form of storage.
I live in an ageing neighbourhood, and you get to see many house
clearances. You see the large metal containers outside, which
seamlessly transport a person's life by truck to landfill, many with
quantities of floppy disks. I can only surmise that a later
generation of the family has decided that unreadable = unimportant.
Technology has moved at a relentless pace. A few years after I got
married, I bought a computer (cutting edge) that the salesman said
had a hard drive so large, it would take years to fill. The SD card
in my K3 is 128 times larger than that was! For those who found
technology left them behind, many important memories are left locked
in obsolete storage formats and I suspect most will be gone forever.
Malcolm
I don't think that is unique to the digital era in photography.
I've seen instances where family didn't appreciate old photos and
trashed negatives & prints that were probably priceless. I've seen it in
my own family where my father gave away most of my grandmother's
photography after she died.
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Religion - Answers we must never question.
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